Daily Reading for March 30 • John Keble, Priest, 1866 (transferred from March 29)
My Dearest Child,
I have just been reading over your letter, and am more vexed than I can say, though not half so vexed as I ought to be, with myself, for not having answered it. I cannot say that engagements have hindered me. I might and ought to have written; neither am I quite so bad as to have forgotten you. It was the old bad habit. And now what can I say, more than you have heard and read in a much better form many times before? One thing I will say, for I am most firmly persuaded of it, that a great part of your dullness and dryness about holy things, probably the whole, so far as it is accountable for by human judgment, is a symptom of your illness: and I daresay you often feel the like distressing want of interest in other matters which you would fain take an interest in: I daresay you often have to rouse yourself up, and force yourself to be or seem amused with things which in former days would have taken hold of you without any effort. If it is so in ordinary things, then its not being so in religious services and meditations would be a merciful interference, more perhaps than one could reasonably expect; and its not being granted, ought not to dishearten one, nor make one think oneself the subject of a special judgment.
Another thing is, that all religious meditation has a tendency, if it be not its direct work, to turn the mind’s eye back as it were on itself; and this is necessarily a painful and wearisome effort, and causes a sort of aching which cannot well be endured when the frame or spirits are weakened by sickness of certain sorts: I suppose, then, that it is a provision of God’s mercy to disqualify the mind in such cases for meditation, and keep it in a kind of dullness, which however uncomfortable, may be as good for the soul and mind, as sleepiness (which is often also most uncomfortable) is for the body. . . . You must not take this, any more than other troubles, as a token of wrath, but as an earnest (how strange soever it may seem to us) of great Love hereafter to be revealed; pardoning Love, inexhaustible, everlasting Love. . . .
In the mean time I beg of you, do not be too severe, do not strain your inward eye by turning it too violently back upon itself: remember you are bound for others’ sake, as well as your own, to be, if you can, and not only to seem, comfortable and cheerful. Do not be afraid to take, as they come, the little refreshments and amusements which His mercy provides for you, and be not too nice in comparing your interest in these with the dullness you may possibly feel in direct religious exercises. Take a lesson from your little ones (may He be with them!) and be patient, or cheerfully thankful, as the case may be, without blaming yourself for what is in all probability God’s visitation, no direct fault of your own.
From Letter XIV, “To a Lady, On Spiritual Dryness” by John Keble, in Letters of Spiritual Counsel and Guidance, edited by Robert Francis Wilson (J. Parker, 1870).